As a confirmed relativist, it would be mere accident whose side I was on.
Ego relativisticus sincerus, solummodo casû cui faveam.
You weren’t seeking to be clear. Only by implication, Laurentius, was it clear, since one doesn’t usually quote Being and Time in the original in a Latin-English thread and without context to make oneself clear. But it is nice, though.
Clarè exprimere non voluisti. Solùm impliciter clarum est, Laurenti. Nemo normaliter latino-anglico in filo, ut se clarè explicet, Ens Et Tempus de Heidegger citet, linguâ pristinâ sine contextu. Dulce autem est, fateor.
Look, skepticism and a critical attitude are fine, ok? I’m just saying that if you disagree with the claims that I’m making it isn’t very useful to simply say “oh, that’s just ideology”. It doesn’t tell me anything about why you don’t think my claims are valid. See what I mean?
Linguistics does make certain theoretical assumptions. I’m not claiming that any science is ever going to be completely unbiased or uninfluenced by theory. But it’s not just based on “beliefs”. There are reasons why I’ve been saying certain things about how language works. Because there’s evidence for it.
And when I disagree with you that language change is due to native speakers making mistakes, it’s not because I just don’t happen to like the idea that languages decay, but because there’s no evidence if this. Because if you actually look at language this claim simply doesn’t make sense.
For example, the fact that languages don’t just change from synthetic to analytic, but also from analytic to agglutinating and agglutinating to synthetic ought to give you pause, don’t you think? Because it suggests that there’s more happening than just loss of grammatical distinctions. If that were the case, we should all be talking like Tarzan right now (or at least all speaking analytic languages), and we’re not.
(It’s true that we don’t see change in the other direction, but there are reasons for this. Speakers tend to work with the grammatical patterns already present in the language; they’re not likely to simply start producing new features out of the blue, and this is what would be required to make a synthetic language out of an analytic one.)
To deny that there is evidence of decay one must know how to look for it. My suspision is that modern linguists præsuppose the æquality of all languages just as moralists præsuppose the æquality of all men. They do not ask themselves under which conditions they would consider one man superior to another; this possibility is excluded by the axioms of their science.
One can refuse to act morally claiming that there is no evidence of any moral imperative in nature. This mistake would not prævent one from being a “serious” physicist.
Go easy on me if I have been too brief, unclear, or have misunderstood something.
Ok, explain to me what is inherently superior about inflections. Explain to me why analytic languages are by their nature unable to express the same nuances as inflected ones. Give me concrete examples of where Latin, say, is a richer language than modern English.
I like inflected languages a lot. I’ve studied Latin, classical Greek, and modern Russian – all Indo-European, all more or less synthetic. And each in their own way very different from each other. I love the amazing flexibility and fluidity of Greek and the craziness of the Russian verb system. I’m not blind to the purely aesthetic pleasure of such languages. I still disagree that this automatically makes them more expressive or richer or even better at purely functional level than a language like English.
It isn’t unclear what you wrote, Laurentius, it’s clearly muddled! You suspect something that is untrue, that modern linguists presuppose the equality of all languages, suggest that this is an axiom of their science, and then suppose that they don’t ask a question that has nothing to do with linguistics: “Under what conditions is one man superior to another?” Then you shift ground, by using an example of someone refusing to act morally because there is no evidence of any moral imperative in nature. You claim that this is a mistake, and that it is a mistake that doesn’t stop someone from being a “serious physicist”. There are many things that stop people from being serious physicists and that indeed is not one of them. But your argument itself would be taken more seriously if it were coherent.
Clarum est, Laurenti, id quod scripsisti, clarè perplexum! Suspicaris rem falsam, scilicet linguisticos modernos assumare ut aequales sint omnes linguae, tunc axioma scientiae linguisticae hoc esse adicis , dein rogas cur quaestionem isti scientiae non referentem non rogent quando enim praestet aliquis alium. Deinde, rem mutas in exemplo ponendo hominis qui modo probo non agat cum careant vestigia in naturâ jussorum moralum. Id erratum esse clamas, erratum quod non vetat aliquem physicum verum esse. Sunt multa quae obstant ut homines physici sint. Verum est non obstat exemplum tuum. Serius autem argumentum tuum habetur si condensius.
S.,
I have never said that I meant richer or better at a purely functional level; I meant æsthetic and poetic quality. There was a shift in the discussion: I begun asking about the reason for the change and at some point someone said that that was people making mistakes: then the focus became evaluative.
A.,
“They” refer to the moralists, not the linguists. Perhaps I should have said “These”. I cannot see that my argument is incohærent. I give two comparisons, that is all.
I think the last thing I shall say to this matter is that if you do not understand the argument, then maybe, just maybe, I am not the one to blame.
I understood your argument as follows: analytic languages are simpler than synthetic languages. The movement from complex to simple is the result of mistakes and is a form of decay. Languages which have not undergone this process of decay are superior to ones which have not.
You wrote, for example:
But it is possible to recognize a foreign language as simpler than one’s own. Conflation of distinctions is a kind of simplification.
From the context I conclude that you believe English has conflated distinctions which are present e.g. in Latin and is therefore a simpler language. It is this claim – that analytic languages are simpler than synthetic ones – which I have been trying to show is simply untrue. Just because a language is morphologically simple doesn’t mean that it’s not complex in other ways.
And therefore languages and chronolects of less democratic times are superior.
That is pretty unambiguous statement of position, is it not? Obviously you don’t specify here in exactly what sense such languages are superior – i.e., moral, aesthetic, overall. But even if you mean “aesthetically superior” here, the claim needs further support.
Please note that my comment on the aesthetic qualities of certain inflected languages was framed as a statement of personal taste. You seem to be arguing that synthetic languages are innately richer aesthetically than analytic ones. I disagree with this. I think the poetic qualities of a language are mostly the result of who is using it. What, in your opinion, makes a language particularly aesthetically pleasing? Conciseness? Flexibility? Rhythm? Nuancedness? Euphony?
I think the last thing I shall say to this matter is that if you do not understand the argument, then maybe, just maybe, I am not the one to blame.
I’m sorry but I’m not going to let you off that easily. I’m not unwilling to consider other points of view, but I do expect to be convinced of the other person’s position. You haven’t thus far offered much concrete in the way of supporting evidence except to say that if I weren’t hindered by my ideology I would understand what you are talking about. If you’re truely convinced of what you’re saying it should be possible to justify it in such a way that others are capable of understanding where you are coming from, even if they disagree with you.
You won’t be surprised, Laurentius, if I agree with Spiphany. Maybe, just maybe, you way you express yourself demonstrates the type of superior aesthetic and poetic qualities you are talking about, that ideological preferences prevent others from appreciating.
Non mirum tibi, Laurenti, me cum Spiphany concurrere. Forsassè, si dubia sit res, modus exprimendi proprius tuus est illarum qualitatum superiorum aisthetikarum poeticarumque quas adnuis, quibus alii non fruuntur praepositionum ideologicarum suarum causâ.
Here’s a simple thought: In order to convey meaning, e.g. the meaning of a sentence like foied vino pipafo cra carefo, you need the proper semes. foied vino pipafo includes a verbal meaning (to take in liquid through the mouth), a valency determined object (that which in its liqud form goes into mouth) which again contains information as to the physical object being denoted and about the possible place of this in the larger complex of the sentence, and information about who does the drinking. Furthermore it has two temporal specifications, namely foied and the tense of the verb. Questions of aspect are put aside, although you might want to stress the reduplication that marks the so-called imperfective aspect (which we shouldn’t think too hard about, I should add). Add to this the second sentence and certain semantic and pragmatic features that presuppose our understanding.
Now, the ancient Faliscan brawler who wrote this expressed who did the consuming of liquids (which is the core of the sentence, the meaning inherent in the stem pip-) through the mouth by means of the ending -o. In English, we would have written a big, fat, vertical line; to specify when the drinking was to be effected, he chose to mark the verb for simple time (-af-) and to further specify when exactly in the future, he added the temporal adverb foed. To mark out what was being taken in, he took the for him natural word vino, and when he spoke out the words, he would probably have nasalized the final vowel, thus marking it for case, which in Faliscan denotes the syntactic function of nominals. I’m in no doubt that every single person reading this will laugh at my simplicitas. But the example is only here to demonstrate once again the ridiculous simplicity of making sense.
Why is this way of conveying meaning superior or inferior to any other? It’s all about putting the semes into a sentence to make sense. It’s as rigorous a task to put together bits of meaning that have to be placed in the right spot as it is to remember to nasalize or add a suffix.
Clearly, it pays to hang around in bars for what you pick up, timeodanaos.
Clarum est, timeodanaos, remuneratur qui in tabernis desidet ad cupediarum capiendum.
You clearly have a working knowledge of university life in Scandinavia.
I tried making sense of the preceding discussion, but I couldn’t. It’s all apples and oranges, Vergil and Horace: all good, but de gustibus non disputandum. I know my predilection for Scandinavian languages comes from the fact that it was in my mother’s milk, and yet it is no noxious feeling.
Language is a strong factor in (national) identities, and calling a language inferior can easily be equated with calling the people inferior. Hm. I hope no one here sees me as their inferior because I speak a language with no case system and only two synthetic tenses, unmarked and marked-for-past.
Lol.. I hope you will be treated as an equal!
I think the premise of stating any particular language as superior of another (or simpler, for that matter) is like saying a sculptors tools are superior to a painters tools. While they may be expressing ideas in completely different ways, the end result is really the same. Is Picasso’s “Guernica” simpler then the statue “Dying Gaul”? An art critic would classify that question as incomprehensible.
The simplicity of a language cannot be easily separated from the users use of it. Can you say that the ancient poets are more expressive then modern ones because modern poet’s language is just too simple??
Sinister: You mentioned about the English language losing inflection due to time/culture? My understanding is that the inflections were gone after the Normans forced the french language into the courts after 1066 AD. English was inflected before then but the french put a heavy influence after that.